President Vladimir Putin confirms Russia will regulate ICOs, cryptocurrency mining by July 2018

President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that Russia will begin regulating both ICOs and cryptocurrency mining by July of 2018.

Russia has enjoyed an interesting October, as first Vladimir Putin condemned virtual currencies and later gave an indication that his nation would develop a ‘CryptoRuble‘ – and now the Russian President has confirmed that his government will regulate both ICOs and cryptocurrency mining by July of 2018.

The Kremlin’s official press service has officially announced that it will regulate ICOs through the same statutes through which IPOs are governed.

Further, the Russian government may move to legally define various terms pertaining to cryptocurrency – namely, ‘distributed ledger technology’, ‘cryptocurrency’,‘token’, and ‘smart contract’.

The report further clarified that concepts for a regulatory sandbox for financial technology services aiming to work in partnership with Russia’s central bank should be published by December 20th of 2017.

The move echoes recent views both expressed by Putin and his government – Russian Central Bank CEO Andrey Kostin quipped that “there was some interest reported in the press, but I’ve not seen in Russia a lot of interest in Bitcoin, to be honest… Until the governments decide how to regulate this area I think it will be very, very dangerous for investors to invest in cryptocurrencies.”

Bitcoin fell sharply this year when the Russian government proposed to ban cryptocurrency exchanges within its borders – of course, China recently followed a similar course with the view of banning both ICOs and Bitcoin exchanges within its territory.